Israel set to approve national strategy for mass evacuation of civilians

 Amid the threats posed by an increasingly unstable Middle East, an Israeli ministerial committee on Monday convened to discuss a national strategy meant to deal with emergency situations that may need a mass evacuation of civilians.

As of now, Israel does not have orderly procedures for adequately responding to scenarios in which hundreds of thousands of its citizens will have to leave their homes - in time of war, or if a natural disaster were to strike, the Yedioth Aharonot daily reported on Monday.

The report reveals details of a stratagem, drawn up by the National Emergency Authority (NEA), which includes an assessment that up to 300,000 Israelis could be forced to discover shelter out of range of incoming missiles or areas struck by an earthquake.

The ministerial committee, headed by Homeland Security Minister Matan Vilna'i, is expected to greenlight the immediate implementation of the strategy. If approved, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) House Front Command and Israel Police will likely be instructed to formulate plans for mass evacuations, to contain criteria of their timing and scope.

The Interior Ministry is going to be tasked with locating public structures all through the country fit to shelter tens of thousands of evacuees. The Housing Ministry, for its part, will draw plans for the hasty construction of temporary, makeshift camps as one more choice.

Additionally, the plan calls for the allocation of a special budget to nearby councils, according to the number of residents within their jurisdiction, slated to finance the simple requirements of prospective evacuees - up to 350 shekels (102 U.S. dollars) per family - for clothing, medicine, diapers and laundry services.

Within the 2006 Lebanon war, northern Israeli cities and towns had been discovered unprepared to shelter their residents from thousands of Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah militants over the course of 33 days.

A state-appointed probe commission later blasted the government for its failure to shelter the civilian population and supply for its needs.

The existing plan is slated to go into high gear amid consistent assessments that hundreds, possibly thousands, of rockets is going to be fired at Israel's urban centers in a future war.

In tandem, the ministerial committee is also expected to approve a separate plan to bolster protection of the country's vital infrastructure - water, electricity and communications - from prospective incoming rockets and missiles, based on the Yedioth Aharonot report.

The plan calls for establishing an inter-ministerial committee headed by the NEA and staffed by representatives from the IDF, Defense Ministry and also the Shin Bet security agency, amongst others. It is going to supervise projects slated to substantially upgrade the survivability of strategic civil facilities and guarantee their operation in a national crisis.

"A strike against specific sensitive facilities may hurt the public and the economy in general," Vilna'i stated on Sunday, adding that Israel's national "robustness" could be dealt a essential blow during war.

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